18 July 2012

18th of July

Not a great deal of activity on the farm this week. Things have been chugging along without any incidents (touch wood).

The GTX670's have managed to get me up to position 36 based upon RAC (Recent Average Credit) on GPUgrid which is what they spend their time processing. Considering I was down around position 150 or so about a month ago this is pretty good. More importantly they are contributing to some useful science.

BOINC testing
We're still testing 7.0.31 which has a few minor changes since 7.0.28. I have reported one issue to do with project initialisation not honouring the exclude_gpu preferences.

Coprocessors
I have been making some inquires with a number of manufacturers regarding coprocessors. I had initial email discussions with Adapteva who have a multi-core CPU, ClearSpeed who make a maths coprocessor and DRC regarding their FPGA offerings. Unfortunately all seem to have priced themselves around $10,000 which makes them too expensive for volunteers to use.

Future plans
At the moment we're still waiting on Nvidia to release a GTX600 series card to replace the 560Ti. I have three GTX560Ti cards so I am keeping an eye on announcements. The main reason is electricity prices went up by another 18% this month, with the carbon tax getting the blame, and my electricty bill is getting rather large now.

I still need to find a case for the Adventure. Once I have one I will also need a machine to run it and might look for a relatively cheap AMD based motherboard. It doesn't need much CPU power as all it needs to do is drive a PCIe x16 slot to feed the Adventure.